Since the Indian elections were at the starting line on April 19, a landslide victory for Narendra Modi was taken for granted. But we correspondents from India, as we covered kilometers far and wide, gathered a different impression. On the WhatsApp chat in which we exchanged ideas, signs of disturbance appeared: there was no perceptible enthusiasm as in the past for the leader Modi, but rather tiredness and resignation. And opposing voices, which only dared to express themselves after having gained their trust.
Even this economic miracle, with India being the fifth largest economy in the world, was not reflected on the ground. People are in debt, paid the same as before Covid, while food costs 6% more per month, but not washing machines or superfluous goods, which however no one buys. Women do not enter the workforce, students become a mass of unemployed and 220,000 people renounce their citizenship and leave every year. These are signs of an economy in crisis.
The results reflect this sentiment. Modi won but he does not have the votes to govern alone: he has to rely on two large regional parties which in the past (one until a few months before the vote) were allies of the Congress, and therefore are extremely volatile. The coalition means two opposite things. The first: corruption and the “cow market”, with the allies imposing conditions and demands, including material ones. The second: a beneficial control of power, towards each other, which could avoid the authoritarian tendencies that we have seen in the past (bypassing the parliamentary process, appointments of judges and institutions without respecting the rules, one-way police investigations against political opponents , etc).
The success of the India group, which obtained 232 seats out of nowhere, is somewhat miraculous. They are very different parties: some focused on the regions they come from, others that look to a particular caste or community, some more to the left, others more bourgeois. It doesn’t matter, they were voted in because they are against Modi.
The prime minister was guilty of arrogance and committed many other oversights, which commentators are now dissecting one by one. For inventory: he dissatisfied the party cadres by giving safe seats to newcomers who had defected from other formations; he made the lower (and numerous) castes fear that he would review the positive discrimination quotas that give them jobs and schools; he insulted the Muslim minority by calling them infiltrators, terrorists and “those who have too many children”, while the people who live next to them know well that things are not like that; he gagged the press and demonized the foreign press; he attempted to impose an agricultural reform that transferred crops to the great potentates of his friends, the Adani Ambani Jindal of the situation; he distributed bags of rice to the poor with a giant size of his face glued on them, taking the funds directly from schools and hospitals; he has contracted out fast trains and roads to his friends, infrastructure that few will be able to use and which act as an engine for the economy (this is why the stock market is in a panic now, fearing a squeeze on public construction).
And then there is the main sin: Hindu religious rhetoric, the heart of his identity politics to the point that he spoke almost of nothing else; it backfired on him. Ironically, the Faziabad seat in the municipality where the Ayodhya temple is located, which Modi inaugurated in January on the ruins of the Babri mosque, went to his opponents.
India seems to have said enough, less temple and more work. India deserves a better chance for its population, for its young people who dream of a future with Instagram (there is no Tiktok here), and must be able to find it within the borders of this great and rich nation.
